Romanian youth gather together to protest corruption. The Tanzanian Prime Minister calls for changes in prison management. And a look at the aftermath of the deadly Quebec terrorist attack. It's Fiery Tuesday, our segment on societal and political news from around the globe. All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!

Well, looks to me over here across the border in Canada that the American government is having a meltdown. I feel a bit like a neighbour listening to a domestic dispute in the next house over. It’s loud. Things are crashing around. People are screaming; people are crying. I want to help, but I don’t know what to do. Should I call the police? I don’t think there’s any police I can call! Should I go over there and knock on the door to protect the people getting injured? I suppose I can roundly condemn the abusive person who’s starting the fight, but it’s not like my neighbours listened when I tried to convince them not to marry the jerk in the first place, so why do I think they’ll listen to me now? I’ve done this much; I’ve tried to keep an extra bedroom open in case it’s needed.

One thing I can do is pay attention to what’s going on in my own house. So meanwhile in Canada, we’re having our own problems. According to the news, two men went into a Quebec mosque the night before last and shot 25 people at evening prayer. Six are dead, and five more are in critical condition.

Thanks the gods for the CBC! As much as people complained that there was no actual breaking news coverage in Western Canada, the CBC were very careful only to release information they actually knew for a fact. Let’s contrast this with CNN or FOX News for a moment.

Right, ’nuff said.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is our public broadcasting service. It is a property of the Canadian people, and does not belong to any private individual. So, while it’s true that it doesn’t have as much random money to throw around as a billionaire-funded network, and therefore its productions aren’t as glossy, neither is it terribly interested in jacking up the ratings. So unlike corporate news networks who want to keep you watching at the edge of your seats at all costs, CBC does what a news network is supposed to do: it reports the news. And only the news. Not political pundits pounding a podium, editorials, or random speculation disguised as news. Just the facts, ma’am. Sometimes they make mistakes, and often they support the corporate agenda, but they don’t make any more money whether thousands of people watch or millions of people watch, so they don’t care to report conjecture, rumour, lies, or nonsense, just to make people angry or afraid.

It’s so effective that it keeps other networks in Canada from benefiting from that approach either; which is the real reason that our political debates are so civilized and that we seem so subdued and polite in our own media. For instance, within a couple of hours of the shooting, a Twitter site deliberately designed to parallel Reuters was claiming that two white supremacists had been identified as the shooters. That was successfully debunked in about an hour, even though some small independent internet magazines did repeat the story, because CBC just kept soldiering on and not repeating what they could not confirm; which forced the other major Canadian news networks, even the privately-owned Corporate ones, to do the same.

What was most interesting to me, however, was the response to the Prime Minister’s statement, which was issued within a few hours of the shooting. You can read it here:

Prime Minister Trudeau posted this on his Twitter account, as he’s prone to do. He’s a modern Western leader and he knows that this means engaging in social media. Within literally minutes of this being posted, there were dozens of responses from the alt-right; most of them American. Here’s some quotes:

importing non-Vetted Refugees… we tried to warn you JT.

Oh boy….how awkward for the liberal cuck!

that means its islamic lol

how about you grow a pair and call out islam as a death cult……

the shooters were Muslim, you must be proud?

were they really Muslim?? Oh the timing is sooo ironic, isn’t it? Make America Safe & Great Again!

I did a double-take. Had they discovered that the shooters were Muslim? I didn’t see that being released anywhere. Had I missed something? I went back and looked; nope, I hadn’t. I read through the Prime Minister’s statement yet again. Nowhere did it say anything about the perpetrators being Muslim. What the hell were these people even talking about?

Then it occurred to me: Do they think that because the word “terrorist” was used, that this was meant as a synonym for “Muslim?”

By gods, I do believe that this is exactly what they think! Because the American alt-right has used “terrorist” as a dog whistle for so long, it has actually come to mean that in the American mind!

Don’t you guys remember the 80s, when all the terrorists were white Irish Catholic Christians? I was still I child, but I remember. A terrorist isn’t a race, or a faith. A terrorist attacks a specific, identifiable group to sow fear and dissent. It isn’t even always based on bigotry; but sometimes it is. In this case, it is.

But now I understand what the right wing means when they say “terrorist.” I never did understand before. I wondered how they thought they were going to wage a war on a tactic? But that’s not what it means to them. When they talk about making the world safe from terrorists, they’re asking us all to help them to oppose a particular group of people who look and pray differently because . . . they look and pray differently. Hmm. I see.

So there’s one suspect in custody now, and he’s been identified as a white, French Canadian described as having “pro-Le Pen and anti-feminist positions” named Alexandre Bissonette. So is anyone talking about a right wing conspiracy to radicalize white people against people of colour? I mean, there was a major shooting in a black church in the U.S. just last year, wasn’t there? Do you think that the American government will ban white French Canadian nationalists from entering the U.S. now? Somehow I doubt it.

This is how our Prime Minister reacted to this. I think that’s pretty much how most of us feel. We’re shocked and we’re sad. We recognize terrorists, no matter what race or faith they are or how they’re organized. We charge them with first degree murder and we lock them up. And then we emulate our media. We try to repeat only the facts we know. We hold vigils. We cry a lot. We get angry. We defend each other. And then we go back to work and get on with our lives. Because ultimately, terrorism is designed to force us to change our behaviour to suit a radicalized world-view, and we can’t let them do that. The truth is that a terrorist of any stripe is just a lunatic with a gun, trying to force us to do what we know is wrong.

Protesters decry the nomination of Donald Trump by the Republican Party. Concerns rise in China about public censorship. And we consider the role gender has to play in this year's election (and what that has to do with Paganism). It's Fiery Tuesday, our weekly segment on political and societal new from around the globe! All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!

The sad events on Orlando where at least 50 people were slaughtered by a person impelled by murderous hatred at least reinforced by religious zeal will be used by many people, especially on the political right, as more evidence that Muslim Americans cannot be trusted to be peaceable citizens. Unmentioned by these same people will be the similar, if smaller scale, killings in Colorado Springs last November by a Christian who said his deeds were in service to his God.

The most militant atheists will argue these killings point to the destructive role of religion in America. Left unmentioned by them will be the millions killed by atheistic regimes in the past century and the important role of men and women of religious faith in some of the greatest achievements of our society. Let us not forget Martin Luther King, Jr. was the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

We Pagans, as people for whom our religion plays an important role, like religious people everywhere, find these crimes in Orlando and Colorado Springs (and many earlier examples, some far worse, going back nearly 2000 years) a time to reflect on religion’s relationship to violence.

Early religious violence

Violence is scarcely unknown in Pagan history.The Aztecs certainly and the Carthaginians very probably practiced human sacrifice on a large scale. Many Pagan societies did so on a much smaller one.Within the Western Pagan tradition Iphigenia’s sacrifice has been immortalized in the work of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles.Though there is debate as to whether human sacrifice ever played a large role in Hellenic culture, it was certainly known of. Significantly, most Pagan societies known to have practiced it eventually abandoned it, based on their own internal development.

Lest followers of Biblical religions feel superior, the story of Jepthah and his daughter should give them pause. (Judges 11:30-9) Many talk of Abraham and Isaac, few discuss this incident with a different outcome. While interpretations of this story are many, all the early ones seem to have considered it a clear case of human sacrifice and only argued about what it meant. That it should have been so widely understood in those terms tells me such practices were not unknown in Israel, especially since Jepthah was a king doing his deity's work.

In time, among most Pagans and all monotheists, human sacrifice died out as an offering of thanks and was rejected.

However, the relation of religion with violence does not end with a discussion of human sacrifice. Or even, as with the Aztecs, war to acquire sacrificial offerings. There are also religious wars between members of different religions, or even of practitioners of what they think is the same religion, but each considers the other heretics. Here the record of killing is overwhelmingly in the monotheistic direction. It is also the kind of violence the world is experiencing today.

The record starts with the genocide reports in the Old Testament. The Old Testament God is reported as commanding "The people of Samaria must bear their guilt,because they have rebelled against their God.They will fall by the sword;their little ones will be dashed to the ground,their pregnant women ripped open.” (Hosea 13:16)

Later the prophet Samuel says the Lord commanded

“I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. [many generations earlier]Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” (1 Samuel 15:2-3) When Saul does not kill quite all of them, their God rejects him as King of Israel.

The record of killing people with the wrong religion, or practicing the ‘same’ religion incorrectly is continuing among some monotheists to the present day. While I see no point in creating a list, historically the death toll dwarfs what happened in any Pagan society, even the Aztecs. Without considering the death tolls arising from Christian and Muslim violence, and sticking only to deaths explicitly recorded in the Bible as ordered by or caused by God, the total is 2,821,364.

Contemporary violence

For mostly historical reasons, most religious violence today is by those claiming to be Muslims.But Islam has no monopoly on violence here.Christianity has spilled plenty of blood in its past and until quite recently in Bosnia. The end of its worst violence did not come as a result of any advances in Christian morality or spiritual understanding. Relative peace arose from mutual exhaustion, when the various factions realized they could never kill all the other side.

And yet there is a puzzle here. Profoundly beautiful and loving teachings are at the core of many teachers in all these monotheistic traditions. Those who have read Rūmī or Martin Buber can attest to an emphasis on kindness and care second to none.Jesus was not alone in this respect.

Kindness and Care in actions as well as words

Many of humankind’s finest moments arose within a monotheistic cultural context and in its name.I think the greatest ethical step forward ever made by human beings was the abolition of slavery. Ultimately successful opposition to a practice many thousands of years old was often led by Quakers. Northern clergymen demonstrating against segregation were among those murdered by Southern racists. And of course, as I mentioned, there is Rev. King.

Nor are such noble acts a Christian monopoly.Far too few Americans appreciate how Iran reacted to the crimes of 9-11.Tens of thousands spontaneously engaged in candle light vigils on behalf of the men, women, and children murdered by the terrorists.

Albania is the only majority Muslim European nation. During WWII it was invaded by the Nazis, who sought to round up every Albanian Jew, plus thousands of Jews who had fled there from the Germans, to deport them to death camps.The Albanians saved everyJew.Most Christian nations did not come close to this record - where an entire nation risked their lives to save people of a different religion who were in many cases strangers.

Monotheism seems to have an innate proclivity to violence and it has inspired some of the most noble people in human history.

Why?

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This is a complicated issue, but one deeply impacting every American, particularly those of us who are non monotheists. Therefore this is the first of a three part piece exploring why the real issue is not Christianity or Islam or even Monotheism, but rather a particular demonic degeneration that all forms of monotheism are especially prone to, and which is again leaving a bloody trail of death and destruction wherever its followers believe they have the opportunity to act in the name of their deity.

Tragedy struck Brussels, Belgium earlier today when bombs went off in Zaventem and Maalbeek, killing at least 33 people and injuring as many as 250. For Fiery Tuesday today we cover these stories and more in this special edition of the Pagan News Beagle.

A writer wonders what it takes to get people excited about climate change. The impact of solar energy on poor farmers is examined. And the refugee crisis brings out some of the worst political elements in Germany. It's Fiery Tuesday, our weekly segment on political and societal news from around the globe! All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!